DEV Community: Knarik

9 business tech events worth to visit

Knarik — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:13:47 +0000

As an early-stage startup, we've had a good fortune to attend a number of tech, business, and dev events over the last few years. Today, I'll share my picks for the top 9 business & tech events to attend.

Slush 🇫🇮

Slush is bringing the global startup ecosystem under one roof. In cold, dark November, a curated group of speakers from across the globe, showcases, and unique networking opportunities will all be in Helsinki. With hundreds of Side Events happening across the city throughout the Slush Week, the fun flows out of Messukeskus and into the streets.

4,200 startup founders and operators.
2,200 investors.
400 media representatives.
A gathering of 12,000 curious minds at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Center.

WebSummit 🇵🇹🇨🇦🇧🇷🇭🇰

Web Summit brings together 70,000+ people, and the companies redefining the tech industry.

A company from Dublin, Ireland, holds events across the world: Web Summit in Lisbon, Web Summit Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Collision in Toronto, and RISE in Hong Kong.

Why attend? Three reasons: incredible speakers, unparalleled networking opportunities, and event app that will maximize your experience.

London Tech Week 🇬🇧

London Tech Week, the UK’s tech flagship event, brings 20,000+ global government and corporate leaders, inspirational start-up founders, senior investors and tech rising stars together to discuss the power of technology for societies.

Held in one of the world's most vibrant tech hub, the week-long festival focuses on the following core topics:

exploring the next gen of tech innovation
impactful innovation at scale
building a thriving tech industry

GrowthHackers Conference 🇺🇸

GrowthHackers Conference is a single-day event happening in September. You will get actionable insights from world-class experimentation practitioners to implement for the year's final quarter.

TheNextWeb Conference 🇳🇱

TNW Conference is where industry leaders and tech enthusiasts alike come together, to explore how tech will shape the world of tomorrow. You'll get insights from industry pioneers, and meet international tech executives, policymakers, startups, and scale-ups.

Disraptors Summit 🇨🇿

Disraptors Summit (formerly SWCSummit) is the major event in the tech & startup territory. It takes place in the beating heart of Europe, in Prague, Czech Republic. Apart from the clash of the regional startup champs, the summit hosts titans of the business world.

Reflect Festival 🇨🇾

Reflect Fest is the biggest tech & entrepreneurial festival in Cyprus will reopen its gate to the doers. Celebrating the innovation that shapes our lives at Reflect.

SXSW Conference 🇺🇸

The SXSW Conference provides an opportunity for the global community of digital creatives to encounter cutting-edge ideas, discover new interests, and network with other professionals who share a similar appetite for forward-focused experiences.

Featuring a variety of tracks that focus on the most important breakthroughs in technology, film, culture, and music, SXSW proves that the most unexpected discoveries happen when diverse topics and people come together.

Viva Technology 🇫🇷

Viva Technology acts as a powerful global catalyst for digital transformation and startup growth. Every year VivaTech brings together, in Paris and online, business leaders, startups, investors, researchers and innovators to ignite positive change in business and for society.

Get to know our team better! Let’s connect at WebSummit, Reflect Festival, Slush, and Disraptors Summit this year! 💜

Results from the Superface API Survey

Knarik — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 15:26:33 +0000

Since we are building an entirely new thing in the API industry, we needed a help from our wonderful community to do it well. So, for two weeks in September 2022, we asked our global online audience to participate in our survey on how APIs are being used.

We covered areas connected with these 4 topics:

Public API landscape
Internal API landscape
API development in general
Consumption of APIs

We received 116 responses in total. Take a look at the insightful data below 💡

What is your role in the company

The majority of respondents identified as developers.

Providing public APIs

In this section, we asked about public and partner APIs provided by the company.

How many public APIs you provide?

How many consumers are using your APIs?

How do you support adoption of your public API?

The majority of respondents support their API with documentation. In some cases, respondents provide only OpenAPI specification.

Which programming languages do you support with your SDK?

The majority of respondents support NodeJS for their SDK, followed closely by Java / Kotlin, and Python.

How do you rate your public API ecosystem's DX (developer experience)?

We’ve asked respondents to rate the Developer Experience of their public API ecosystem on a range from 0 to 10. The majority ranked their DX above 5, with most respondents choosing 7.

When asked about a reason for the rating, most respondents mentioned their documentation — as being either well written, or poor and outdated. A frequent sentiment was that their DX “could be better”.

How long it takes to integrate your APIs?

The majority of respondents picked hours or days as an estimated time for integration of their APIs.

Internal APIs

In this section, we asked about the internal API landscape of respondent’s company.

Which technologies do you use for internal APIs?

The vast majority of respondents use REST internally. Async APIs (including message queues) and GraphQL are used in around quarter of cases.

How do you keep track of your internal APIs?

Majority of respondents use source code repository for keeping track of internal APIs. Two respondents mentioned use of Postman collections, we have included them under API catalog option.

How many internal APIs have more than one consumer?

About a quarter of respondents estimated that up to 30% of their internal APIs have more than one consumer.

How do you support developer experience of internal integrations?

Documentation is the most common way for supporting the DX of internal integrations. Among other responses were video tutorials and pair programming.

Do you use API federation to access multiple APIs at once?

More respondents don't use API federation.

API development

In this section, we asked how APIs are being developed in the company, both internal and external.

How do you update your APIs (both internal and external)?

The majority of respondents add or depreciate fields and endpoints on the current API version. In contrast to the minority of respondents who maintain multiple versions of their APIs.

How many versions do you maintain?

This question applied only to respondents who answered that they maintain multiple versions of their APIs. Out of these, the majority support the last 2-5 versions.

How good do you think is API versioning in your company in general?

This question also applied only to the respondents maintaining multiple API versions. On the scale of 1 to 10, most respondents marked their internal API versioning by Mark better than five. Interestingly, no respondent gave the mark of 9 or 10.

Do you have API guidelines?

Majority of respondents does have API guidelines.

Consuming APIs

In this section, we asked about the consumption of third-party APIs.

How many 3rd party APIs do you consume as a company?

According to respondents, more than half of their companies consume 10+ APIs.

How many of your services/apps use more than 1 provider for the same or very similar use-case?

In this question, we asked about use of multiple providers for similar use-cases. Per provided answers, most respondents have at least one application using more than 1 provider.

How much time in days you spend on API integrations per month?

Most respondents spend 10 or fewer days on API integrations.

Do you have a dedicated team/people for integrations?

About half of respondents have a dedicated team for integrations.

Conclusion

We are super happy to see what our community has to say. We hope these insights on the API landscape were useful for you too!

If you have any other feedback to help us improve, please share your input to our email or in comments below. 👇

PragueJS Community 2022: Developer Experience

Knarik — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 09:58:25 +0000

We’re excited to join the PragueJS community as one of their sponsors.

In case you haven't heard, it’s a community of about 2,000 JavaScript developers based mainly in Prague, Czech Republic.

PragueJS community is a group of rising JavaScript enthusiasts 💛 who meet every month in different places, to discuss all the cutting-edge trends and tweaks in JavaScript and related topics.

The April’s meetup topic was Developer Experience (DX) where Jan Vlnas (our developer advocate at Superface) was sharing his insights about how to lose users and alienate developers. 😈

What did the people say?

It was my pleasure to have taken the stage together with Jan Vlnas from Superface. I really enjoyed his standup comedy-like take on DX (especially the “unexpected open source sponsorship”) 🤡

— Jozef Zeman, DX Heroes

What did the PragueJS organizers say?

The reason why Karel Žoha, Petr Brzek and I decided to put all the effort into event organisation is quite simple. We wanted to help the community with knowledge sharing and also to have some fun.

PragueJS is currently the biggest JS community in the Czech Republic with a long and pretty turbulent history. We delivered tens of talks to thousands of attendees, all for free.

But the most valuable for me personally are all the new friendships we helped establish over time at our afterparties, which are an important part of the whole experience.

— Filip Mareš, co-founder of PragueJS, along with Karel Žoha, and Petr Brzek

So, how do you lose users and alienate developers?

A good documentation, thoughtful library, or well-designed API rarely gets appreciated. So let's try it the other way around! 😁

Annoy your coworkers, drive away contributors, and become infamous in the open-source world with these easy tips.

Sounds doable? Maybe. But have you tried this?

Memes & all by Jan Vlnas, superface.ai

Take a look at the full presentation deck (it’s mostly GIFs, though).

You can find a few recorded talks from the past meetups on PragueJS YouTube Channel.

Join the PragueJS community at Meetup.com! There's an upcoming meetup about typed functional programming on June 29th and more coming in September.

By the way, we also have our meetup, called “API Prague: The people and tech behind open APIs”.

The Power of Core Values in Workplace: How we Handle it at Superface

Knarik — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:02:00 +0000

People have been told for ages to not care about their job, customers, and their employees, and care only about numbers. We exist in a corporate manufacturing mindset for too long.

I want to share my experience of the exceptional that will push you to reconsider your company culture or advocate for significant changes.

When I was looking for a new position a few years ago, I was imagining a company with the values that I have never met before working with other startups from Prague, Moscow, London, and Vienna for a quite long time.

I had about 15 interviews with different startups in Prague and abroad. Looking for the "aha" feeling about the company culture and communication, after all other requirements were met.

I found a Content Producer role at Superface that wasn't really suitable for me since I was looking for a Marketing Manager position. Nevertheless, I still applied, knowing that my chance to get the role is quite low. I just loved how the job description sounded like and company values that were mentioned there.

And then I had a few calls with Radek, CEO & Co-founder at Superface, I was immediately certain that we had a connection after the first interview. After a few more interviews and knowledge/creativity test, I got an email from Radek that I didn't really match with the required position, but he came up with a new position especially for me. I was shocked!

I was truly impressed by the open-mindedness of the CEO and his approach. Since then, Superface team never stopped surprising me (in a good way 😄). During almost a year and half, I discovered even more about the Superpeople and the company values, and now I want to share it with you. My main goal is to share with you something unique that is not common in the Czech startup scene. Maybe it can inspire you and your team too!

Core values, vision, mission 💙🚀

The values established by any company are not just a set of rules, but those tools that can be applied in practice. These are the main principles that are used when interacting with other companies, customers and employees.

Both employees and customers always prefer to work with companies whose values are the same as their own. This makes the task of setting values an important factor in driving customer relations and attracting the best talents.

At the same time, the vision and mission statements define the purpose of the company and inspire a sense of belonging and identity to the employees.

✨ What is our vision?

We are the creator of and navigator in the universe of capabilities.

All the mankind capabilities accessible to AI (programmatically) without the need for human intervention.

✨ What is our mission?

We shape the digital business

We enable business to happen digitally
We democratize the markets
We are the new way of business-making
We empower developers
We make business accessible to AI

Bad Flash Bar in Karlín 2022.

💫 What are the core values at Superface?

Clarity of communication. Transparency in communication is essential. To cultivate a healthy workspace, it's influential to build a trustworthy environment first, where people can share their ideas, concerns, and feedback without the slightest hesitation.

Trust and honesty. No dogmas. These are crucial when working together towards the same objectives. It keeps the team motivated during challenging times. Errors are inevitable. The key is to speak up to it and do your best to fix it.

Autonomy and freedom. When people are not given freedom in their daily work-life, it usually decreases the motivation and happiness of employees in a long run. Nowadays, there is a growing demand for independence and flexibility in the workspace that causes companies to break their old patterns of managing company and people. Bring up freedom and trust to the table!

Clear ownership and competency. When you let your employees take ownership of their work, they treat the project they are working for — and its money — as if it were their own.

Equal treatment. Diversity and inclusion is a key to the efficient work and development of the team.

No intolerance, no harassment. Any kind of intolerance or harassment are unacceptable in the workplace.

Superface Demo Day 2021 in Prague.

It has to be fun. After all, we are all humans --- not machines. Having fun activities as a team always increases the team happiness. Team buildings, one-on-one sessions, coffee breaks, anything that can can give additional value to your employees, will be the best to try out.

Customer-oriented. Businesses exist to satisfy interests and needs of the customers. We also love our customers and treat them with the good intentions. 💙

Your values reflect your business beliefs, principles, and decisions that determine who you are as a company.

All these values that cultivate happiness are so important in our daily work-lives, as we spend so much time at work. Choose the right values to make your team happier, productive and successful. 😎

At Superface, we have a policy of transparency, openness, and trust. We believe that our people develop relationships based on trust with their peers and leaders, which causes the company to excel. As a result, our team has more flexibility, and they are motivated since they know they aren't just working for a company, but rather they work to make an impact.

If you want to explore more about company values, take a look at the Twilio's CEO and Co-Founder Jeff Lawson, who had a speech a few years ago about company values and why businesses require a strong culture.

Twilio’s CEO and Co-Founder Jeff Lawson on Company Values

Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human.

— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

🚀 A bit about Superface

We were at WebSummit 2021 in Lisbon.

A framework for API integrations. Superface allows developers to build better applications and use more APIs.

It's a language and protocol for abstracting integrations to application use cases.

Yes, if you don't have a programming background, this might sound too much 🤯 but share it with your dev team, and they might love it!

Superface allows use case discovery and distribution of integration code at runtime.

What are the use cases we have?

Ready-made solutions: geolocation, geocoding, SMS, image processing, NLP, analytics, crypto exchange, email, weather, social media, CRM, and any other solutions can be generated with [Integration designer (coming soon).

One of the integration solutions (so-called use cases) is geocoding.

See in action at superface.ai and check out the geocode integrations.

What can you do now?

If you've never taken the time to establish a clear set of values, this might be the right time to do just that. If you're already doing this in your company, evaluate how effective they are. Are they being followed by the team and have they helped your company reach its goals? Regardless of where you are on the values spectrum, it's important to occasionally reflect on these issues to determine whether what you're doing is working.

Even if it's not going to be an exact listing of values, don't be afraid to share your ideas with the rest of your team. As you grow, it will provide guidance along your journey and help to define who you are as a company.

Join our journey on Discord, Twitter and here at Dev. We're soon going to announce more exciting news!